As part of a generation that is in many ways molded by media, narratives permeate throughout our lives. We carry this obsession with a clean-cut narrative with a beginning, middle and end to our everyday lives. Why shouldn’t we? In movies, the hero gets the girl, the slacker gets their grades up in time and the team wins the big game in overtime. Don’t worry though, if these events don’t happen as expected, at least learning a great life lesson is 100% guaranteed. Unfortunately, real life doesn’t always come with great life lessons.

It hurts for me to say this, given that I watch as many movies as I can get my hands on, but the truth is that most of the time a bad day is just a bad day, not the beginning of a life-changing epiphany that takes place during a walk through the rain. As human beings, we are prone to giving more significance to events while they are happening. Failing a test feels disastrous in the moment and spending hours on an essay only to have it ripped apart by your teacher is deflating.

High school sports are vulnerable to dramatizing as well. Our school’s football team went 4-5 this year, a far cry from the state championship “Friday Night Lights” taught me to expect. We didn’t dominate our conference, and we also never had a heartfelt locker room moment where the meaning of teamwork came to us through an inspirational speech. We were mediocre, and there’s no deep life lesson to be learned from that.

While I believe that narratives can be found throughout life, they don’t present themselves in obvious ways. I don’t remember having a profound “aha!” moment, or meeting the kindly old professor who taught me to “Carpe diem!” In fact, most significant changes in my life have come from a simple decision to try something new and stick with it. When I started journalism my junior year, I started without a clear sense of direction or any set goals, and over time I grew fond of it. I didn’t stumble upon a scandal I needed to uncover, and I didn’t follow Cameron Crowe’s path detailed in “Almost Famous,” touring the country to profile a rock band.

If you spend high school looking for your narrative to appear, you won’t find it. Instead of trying to fit every aspect of your high school career into familiar formats, step back and allow yourself to be interested in opportunities naturally. Invest in the things you enjoy, but don’t be too surprised if they don’t end up looking the way you expected them to, because real stories rarely do.